I was thinking about this again after reading https://jlai.lu/post/22505617 and how Tesseract shut down because of people’s inability to behave. And this isn’t the first occasion where I’ve seen people really abruptly leaving Lemmy or the fediverse because of the general atmosphere. Personally I’ve avoided most political communities aside from a few, and I’ve mostly engaged in more niche places, and I haven’t encountered too many issues with people. But I’ve definitely seen very snarky, aggressive comments from some people, and no doubt there are more of those the more political the community is. I guess it’s logical that the fediverse would attract those most opinionated, or those that have been banned on other platforms for inciting (what someone else might see as) hate, violence or other various reasons.

Do you think the fediverse has a civility problem and is there anything we can do about it?

  • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    I don’t think the Lemmy software can do anything about it, as it places too much emphasis on manual labor on behalf of the moderators to keep up.

    PieFed has some really neat ideas though, on democratization of moderation where users can set software preferences, thereby taking a substantial burden off the shoulders of the mods.

    e.g. instead of relying on mods to remove posts, keyword filtering allows individual users to reduce exposure to topics such as “Musk” or “Trump” or “USA”. Or user icons are really cool - e.g. new user account with age <2 weeks, or highly contentious user with >10x more downvotes than upvotes, or potential unregistered bot account that posts >10x more often than they reply in comments. None of those cause “removal” of content except in the recipient’s personal feed.

    • Undearius@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      I do like the idea of leaving the curation of content in the hands of the user.

      I think the mentality should be more common, and the tools should make it easy, to filter out content the same way it’s easy and common to follow a community/topic that adds to your feed.

      Almost all social platforms have a method at the forefront to “see more content like this” but a lot don’t have “see less of this”, and if they do, it’s a buried setting.

      It’d be really interesting for mods and admins to get a list of users’ exclude list, either of post keywords or user blocks, to see trends and stats on the content that people don’t want to see.